The Epiphany Machine Read online

  The first time I asked my father about the epiphany machine was also the only time that he hit me. What made an impression on me was not the actual physical contact, a gentle slap only slightly more abrasive than the wind that was blowing very hard for an October day. My father seemed no more likely to slap me than to slit my throat and watch me bleed out into the leaf-clogged gutter, so for all I knew that might come next. In my young mind, for him to have hit me at all meant that something must have been unlocked in him, something that would have remained boxed up had I not liberated it with the magic words “the epiphany machine,” and that would now never cease to pursue me until it had achieved my destruction.

  He knelt down and looked me in the eye. “You have no idea how much I’ve gone through to protect you from that horrible thing.”

  This made me sob.

  “If you’re old enough to know about the epiphany machine, then you’re too old to cry.”

  This only made me sob harder.

  “Venter, you need to tell me who told you about the machine. Was it your grandmother? She promised me she wouldn’t say anything about it until we both agreed that you were old enough.”

  “It wasn’t her. I just heard about it on TV.”

  This was not technically a lie. One night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I had heard my grandmother weeping while watching an eleven-o’clock news report suggesting that the epiphany machine might be responsible for the spread of HIV, another thing I had never heard of. I connected this to the time when my father had made an excessively big show of not freaking out over the cover of a copy of a magazine that had been left on the table at a coffee shop: “Did a Tiny Cult in New York City Help Spread HIV?” But these events had happened weeks earlier—which might as well have been decades according to my sense of time—and were not why I had asked about the device. I had asked because, at recess that morning, I had heard one teacher whisper to another as I passed by, “His mother got a tattoo from the epiphany machine.” Now I wanted to know what it was. I was also wondering whether the epiphany machine had something to do with the tattoo on my father’s forearm—SHOULD NEVER BECOME A FATHER—that he had sat me down to talk about shortly before I was old enough to read it, claiming he had gotten it as a stupid prank when he was very young, long before I was born.

  “On TV!” my father said, laughing. “My brilliant boy, I’m sorry I slapped you. Let’s take a walk.” We walked past the crematorium across from our house to the cemetery two blocks away. (Queens was and remains a city of the dead with some halfhearted gentrification from the living.) The wind continued as we maintained silence for several rows of what my father and grandmother called “nails on a sum,” aping what they said had been my attempt, at the age of three, to say that gravestones looked like thumbnails. I got myself together and stopped crying, but then I suddenly realized that my father must be taking me to see my mother’s grave—that this was how he was going to tell me that my mother was dead, and had not merely run away. I started sobbing again. This time my father did not scold me, but he did not comfort me either. He just looked out at the traffic. Finally, he spoke.

  “Do you know why your grandmother and I think that ‘nails on a sum’ is funny?”

  “Because it’s silly?”

  “Because it’s not silly. Because it’s actually exactly correct. They’ve told you in school what a sum is, right?”

  “That’s in adding.”

  “Exactly. Can you give me an example of a sum?”

  “In two plus two equals four, the sum is four.”

  “Good, my brilliant boy!”

  This made me feel very, very good, as the fact that I hated him at the moment did not make me long any less for him to think that I was a genius.

  “The sum is what things add up to,” my father continued. “Everyone wants his or her life to add up to something. All the people in this cemetery, all the people that we’re walking on, they all did lots of stuff, hoping to make the sums of their lives go higher and higher and higher. Maybe a few of them had sums that were very high, most of them had sums that were not so high. In every case, the gravestone is like a nail on that sum—not like the nail on your thumb, actually, but like the nails in a roof, the nails that say: no, house, you’re not going any higher. Gravestones are like nails on a person’s life, keeping the sum from getting any higher.”

  Often, he couldn’t tell exactly at which level to speak to me, and so said things that made no sense on any level.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Okay. In a baseball game, there’s a score, right? At the end of the game, each team has gotten a certain number of runs. The sum that I’m talking about in a person’s life, that’s like a score.”

  Something was stirring in me, a mature and morally serious version of the most childish emotion of all: impatience.

  “Dad,” I said. “What is the epiphany machine and where is my mother?”

  “I’m getting to that,” he said. “So the sum of one’s life is the sum of everything you’ve done. And as you get a little older you start to realize that sooner or later you’re going to end up here, in this cemetery or one exactly like it, and you want to make sure that your sum is as high as possible. The problem is that life is more confusing than a baseball game. In a baseball game, a run is a run and that’s that. In life, sometimes you’re not sure what counts as a run. Also, you don’t know what the teams are. Or whether you’re even playing. Sometimes you think you’re playing and you’re actually just sitting in the stands, watching other people play.”

  “Dad.”

  “Okay. All this means that you have to make up your own way of scoring. You have to decide what’s important. For a lot of people, it’s money. For a lot of other people, it’s some kind of religious fulfillment. You know what the most important thing is to me?”

  I shook my head. I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  “You are the most important thing to me. So whenever something good happens to you, or whenever I see you smile, or whenever you learn how to do something, that’s like a run for me. When something bad happens to you, that’s like a run for the other team. That’s why I had to do what I did just now. Even though I didn’t really hit you—it was really just a love tap, wasn’t it?—I still felt horrible while I was doing it. I felt much worse than you felt, believe me. But the epiphany machine is very bad and I have to do whatever it takes to keep you safe from it. It’s the sort of thing that could cause you to lose the whole game.”

  “What?”

  “I’m saying that figuring out what’s important in life and how to go about getting it is very difficult. Sometimes you get confused and you get tempted to just let other people make the rules. And some people are really happy to make the rules for other people. Adam Lyons, the man who runs the epiphany machine, is one of those people. There was a time when I let myself get confused enough that I let him write those words on me that you know aren’t true.”

  “The epiphany machine writes things about people on their arms?”

  “Exactly, my brilliant boy! I figured out that the machine was wrong. Your mother, on the other hand . . . well, Venter, it told her that she ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST. You weren’t born yet so she didn’t know what matters most. Then you were born and she abandoned you.”

  “Why did she listen to the machine if you didn’t?”

  “That’s the first question you should ask her if you meet her.”

  “I don’t ever want to meet her.”

  “That shows that you are a very smart boy.”

  If I had actually been a very smart boy, I probably would have kept asking questions. At the very least I would have recognized his persistent flattery as a shutting-down of my curiosity no less violent than the slap. But I wanted his praise more than I wanted the truth.

  That night I went do
wnstairs to see my grandmother, who had laid out pound cake, my favorite. She was sitting in her recliner, knitting an afghan.

  “Grandma, what do you know about the epiphany machine?”

  I was expecting her to stop knitting and look up at me with fury, but she didn’t even slow her rhythm. My father had obviously warned her. She was silent for a moment, filling the room with the sound of her plastic needles hitting each other.

  “The epiphany machine is why I no longer have a daughter and why you no longer have a mother. It is for people who are lonely, gullible, and numb.”

  “What’s ‘numb’?”

  “‘Numb’ is when you can’t feel anything. People who can’t feel anything do weird things to get their feeling back. They spend money they don’t have on a fox fur coat. They want the coat to make them feel warm and elegant, they want the coat to make them feel like a real somebody. Then the coat doesn’t make them feel anything. So they let some stranger put a needle in them, hoping that will make them feel something. Then they can’t feel the needle. That’s when they decide they don’t care about anything. They don’t care if the sight of their tattoo makes their mother sick to her stomach. They don’t care if they leave their mother, their husband, their son. They don’t care about anything because they can’t feel anything. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay. If your tongue were numb, you couldn’t taste pound cake. So there would be no point in me giving you pound cake. You can either be a pound cake boy or an epiphany machine boy. Which is it going to be?”

  “I’m a pound cake boy,” I said.

  I ate pound cake every night for months afterward and never once asked about the epiphany machine. I even pretended that I didn’t know that parents, terrified of AIDS, were telling their children to stay away from me, though of course I started hearing this every day at school. I pretended, too, that I had no idea that this was why we moved away from Queens to an affluent town in Westchester, in the hope that no one there would hear of our connection to the machine. It’s even possible that I flattered myself about how good I was getting at pretending not to know things, one important life skill at which I was most likely outpacing my peers.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When we arrived in Westchester, I was under strict orders never to say anything about the epiphany machine to anyone. I was supposed to tell anyone who asked that my mother had abandoned the family, and say that I didn’t know anything more than that. This worked, and I was avoided because I was weird rather than because I was dangerous. It often occurred to me that I would have preferred the latter to the former, but for years I never said anything. I didn’t want my father and grandmother to move us again. (There was not a chance anyone would discover the tattoo on my father, since he wore a suit on the Metro-North platform, a sport jacket to the grocery store, and stayed clear of pool parties.)

  Throughout these same years I don’t think I asked my father or grandmother a single question about the machine. I had decided not only that I knew what it was, which I didn’t really, but that I knew what it meant, which I didn’t at all. The machine was for people who were lonely, gullible, and numb, and believed in by people who stayed that way. My mother was one of those people. I said the words “the epiphany machine” only to my father or grandmother, and only when I wanted to please them by saying: “The only people who use the epiphany machine are lonely, gullible, and numb.”

  Those were the three words I used when I finally did mention the epiphany machine at school, on the playground in fourth grade. There were a few boys who liked to bother me about the fact that I didn’t know where my mother was, chanting things like “Venter’s mother is a slut,” a word they knew despite likely having no more than the dimmest idea what sex was. Eventually I said: “My mom’s not a slut, she’s lonely, gullible, and numb.” I felt superior when they didn’t understand that the word “numb” wasn’t just what novocaine made your mouth when you went to the dentist.

  “It’s a figurative use of the term,” I said, having heard my father say “It’s a figurative use of the term” once and deciding that it applied here. (To taxonomize myself, I was one of those smart children who wishes he were much smarter, and so compensates with a smug attitude toward other children and a toadying one toward adults. Honestly, I was probably bullied less than I deserved.)

  These kids and others kept pushing me to explain what I had meant, and finally I said: “My mother used the epiphany machine!” I think I feared that we would be tarred and feathered and sent out of town, “tarred and feathered” being a phrase I had heard in movies I watched with my grandmother. But the kids hadn’t heard of the machine. I discovered slowly, over the next few months, that some of the parents had heard of it, but for the most part thought it was something to snicker over, not to fear. (I later learned that the link between HIV and the machine had been definitively debunked—the institute that had posited the link in the first place turned out to be a right-wing Christian operation unhappy with the strange theology of Adam Lyons.)

  I am not sure that I actually felt the absence of my mother, a woman I had never meaningfully met. To be honest, the times I missed my mother most intensely were when a teacher would ask me whether I missed her. And even then the emotion I felt was probably a desire to impress the teacher with the depth of my emotion, itself an emotion strong enough to cleave a child in two. And there were those moments when other kids, with varying degrees of subtlety, would harass me, first for not having a mother and later for having a mother who had joined a cult. Approval and protection were the only things I wanted from a mother. Maybe these are the only things a mother can give. I wouldn’t know.

  Or maybe that’s a self-pitying way for me to describe my childhood. After all, I did have a mother in my grandmother, who cared for me by moving slowly but all the time. The signal sound of my childhood was of her shuffling feet, which would take her around the house with great noise and over the objection of her aching joints. She cooked goulash or lasagna or pot roast for us almost every night (resorting to spaghetti only when she was unusually tired), often changing a lightbulb or a roll of toilet paper on the other end of the house while the water was boiling. I should have helped, no question about that, although in my defense she adamantly refused my help on the (admittedly rare) occasions that I offered it. It didn’t take the genius I hoped myself to be to realize that doing everything for me was my grandmother’s way of redeeming herself for failing as the mother of my mother. Her more conscious attempts to revise her parenting style were less successful. “I gave your mother too much freedom and let her watch too much TV, so you can only watch three hours a week,” she often said, but in practice she gave me an essentially unlimited amount of freedom and let me watch an essentially unlimited amount of TV. We also watched a lot of movies together, mostly riches-in-the-midst-of-the-Depression musicals and gangster movies, as we tried to pretend that we truly enjoyed each other’s company and were not trying to distract ourselves from our mutual loneliness.

  If my father was lonely as well—he appeared to have no social acquaintances—he did a remarkable job of channeling this loneliness into a stream of staggering productivity that would suggest a man operating at an unsustainable pace save for the fact that he sustained it. In addition to the infamous hours of a partner at a corporate law firm, Isaac Lowood worked obsessively on his private passion, privacy, and wrote an influential book on the subject, Polaroids, Pac-Man, and Penumbras: Technology, the Supreme Court, and the Future of the Fourth Amendment. He boasted of a colleague who had referred to him as “a legend in his spare time.” Other colleagues complained of all the time he spent on extracurricular pursuits, but he could always point to the fact that he billed more hours than they did. My grandmother made sure I knew that none of this would have been possible if she did not drive me to and from school and see to one hundred percent of household chores, but it also wo
uldn’t have been possible if my father slept more than five hours each night and worked fewer than sixteen hours each day. (His workday began the moment he stepped on the train in the morning, when he would remove files from his briefcase and start reading.)

  It is also true that it would not have been possible if he had spent much time with me. I’m not sure what we would have done together, other than maybe watch sports that neither of us liked. My father did the best he could, which as a description of human behavior sounds like a tautology but is actually true of very few people.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The epiphany machine only truly came into focus for me around the same time that I met Ismail. If one or both of us had not been assigned to Ms. Scarra’s ninth-grade Global Studies class, then you might be watching a play written by Ismail rather than reading a book written by me. I fell in love with Ms. Scarra as soon as I walked into class on the first day, and I was determined to lose my virginity to her, a goal I probably chose because I had seen the scenario in a few of the nudie movies I had only recently discovered on late-night cable. At the very least, I was determined to make her think I was a genius. So I was annoyed that her early favorite was another boy. Though unreligious, I had a great interest in the world religions we studied early in the year, and would have been the star of any other class. But Ismail’s command was undeniable. He was extremely knowledgeable about not only Islam, his own religion, but also Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and particularly Zoroastrianism, of which his late father had been a scholar. When I say Islam was Ismail’s own religion, I mean it was his own religion in the way that Judaism and Catholicism were my own religions, ambiguously inherited from parents who had not themselves been believers. Ismail made it very clear one day that he thought that religion was “stupid” and that “anyone who doesn’t hate thinking knows there’s no God,” which angered a lot of the other kids, most of whom had already embarked on lifelong careers of believing in God whenever they needed comfort or forgiveness that they did not want to ask another human being for. The nasty tenor of his remarks gave me some hope that I would become the teacher’s favorite despite being outmatched, hope that was bolstered the next day when Ms. Scarra asked him to stay after class, maybe to lecture him about respecting the beliefs of the other students. Then she asked me to stay as well, so I got to listen as she praised Ismail effusively and he looked on with a barely respectful smirk, almost certainly harboring the same fantasies about Ms. Scarra that I did and appearing to have at least a slightly higher likelihood of fulfilling them. Finally, she turned to me and said a couple of nice things about me—not as nice, I thought, as what she had said about Ismail—and asked us to serve as co-presidents of the Coexistence Club, an afterschool group that would be devoted to harmony among religions. Ms. Scarra said that religious intolerance was cultural intolerance, and that since between the two of us we had cultural ties to the three major monotheistic religions, we were the ideal co-presidents. I think Ismail was as unhappy with the situation as I was, since there were strong flavors of tokenism, condescension, and illogic in the whole endeavor. We might have asked her about the arbitrary focus on monotheism and why she didn’t want to include a co-president who was actually religious—the idea of two atheists coexisting seemed strange. We might also have asked what she might possibly have thought the purpose of the club was. But Ismail and I both said yes, since the club was obviously going to look good on the college applications we were already looking forward to filling out. More important, Ms. Scarra was a female who was willing to talk to us.